


Case File #742

by potterwatch



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Aurors, Draco is kind of an asshole too, Gore, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Pre-Slash, Torture, harry is an asshole
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-15
Updated: 2019-08-15
Packaged: 2020-09-01 15:27:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,908
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20260324
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/potterwatch/pseuds/potterwatch
Summary: When Draco is thrown into the cell, he’s furious. When Potter gets thrown in behind him, he’s pissed.





	Case File #742

**Author's Note:**

> This got darker than originally intended. WARNING: Everyone gets a little bloody. And maybe loses some fingers. Ouch.

When Draco is thrown into the cell, he’s furious. When Potter gets thrown in behind him, he’s pissed.

“I thought I told you to run!” He snaps, as one of the death eaters they’d been chasing slams the door behind them. Potter’s auror robes swish around his thighs as he pushes past Draco.

“I thought I told you to run,” he says, cockily. Potter says everything cockily. He’s a dick like that. Draco’s blood begins to steam his ears.

“No,” he grits out, “you said get behind me and I’ll take them all out. Then you held your wand up in the completely wrong position and started yelling nonsense.” It had almost worked, too. That was the worst of it. Potter’s inane babbling had taken out half of their pursuers before one of them had gotten a curse in under his guard, and only barely, only because Potter was spinning to take down three at once. 

Potter had been an auror for three years and he and Draco had been working together, on and off, for one of them, and he was still the same arrogant bastard he’d been at school. It was just Draco’s luck that he was good at what he did, too, which only served to inflate his ego. Draco was sure he’d kill Potter, really, one of these days, if only to finally get some peace and quiet. But then there’d probably be a funeral. With like, two separate parades, and a week of public mourning, and Draco can’t put up with that.

“Well then,” Potter says, and he’s already found a wall to lean dashingly against, hooking his fingers in the belt hooks of the ridiculous jeans he wears underneath his open robes, “maybe you should get your friends to let you out and invite you to a nice cup of tea so that you don’t have to put up with me.”

“They’re not my friends!” Draco snaps, and he can feel anger scorching a path up his throat. In a minute, he’ll be spitting fire, and that would show Potter. Nott had already tried to kill him seven times in the past few years and he’s pretty sure the other two, Haze and Swanson, are at least partially responsible for the contaminated batch of potions they’d been chasing.

It had been a nasty sort – sold to muggles as a cold tonic, then blowing up in their faces and going for their guts. They’d found six bodies this month, two of them children, and just gotten a tip that the potion was about to go into mass production. 

Which was the problem, really, apart from the fact that it murdered people. Draco was, after all, the aurors’ go-to potions expert. They might’ve hated him, and thought he was a spineless, Dark Arts weasel (Potter’s words, and really, not very creative) but they knew that Draco knew his way around a cauldron, and that had let him rise in the ranks beside Potter, even if half of those ranks probably would’ve spit on his grave.

No one understood why Draco wanted to be an auror. Not Pansy, not Blaise, not his mother. They all assumed he’d meet a nice girl, settle down, and enjoy a life of luxury as the Malfoy heir. Well, his mother did. The rest assumed he’d drink his way around the magical world, and maybe the non-magical world as well, and pick up several charming, debaucherous drinking partners along the way. None of them assumed he’d study and train and fight to join the ranks of an organization that very much wanted him dead. But he had. Thank you very much. And ok, there had been some drinking and debauchery along the way, but he had proven to most, and almost to himself, that Draco Malfoy had a right to be there. That he wanted to do some good.

And that was it, really, that after everything, after the trials and the war, Draco wanted to be part of something that was going to do some good. He needed to. Needed to do his part to clear up this wretched mess he and he family had made. Not that he agreed with it all. There was some blinding pure blood prejudice in the auror ranks, but if he waited long enough to start until he agreed with every part of it, he’d never start at all, and Draco needed to get started.

He could feel the itch in the off hours, feel it crawl up under his collar and burrow into his skin, until he was calling it an early night and canceling plans to get back to the office.

Which was what brought him to Potter, the bastard. Shacklebolt may have hated Draco, not so deep down, under his veneer of calm professionalism, but he couldn’t deny that Draco put the hours in, second only to the boy hero, the Asshole Who Lived. And that was the thing of it. because Potter never stopped, never paused for breath, just worked case after case until the walls of Azkaban were filled with murderers and Death Eater scum, and the aurors had to scour the streets for signs of wrongdoing.

Not that they had problems finding it. There was always crime, always evil, even with Potter doing his best to burn it from the streets.

And so Shacklebolt had taken one look at Draco, and one look at Potter, and seemed to think they deserved each other. They’d worked one case together, then two, then every other week Draco had to grit his teeth at the sight of tangled black hair (which, really, had gotten even worse, somehow, since Hogwarts).

This case was just another one of them, just another week of trying to play nice and waiting for it to be over. Until now.

Draco slams his hands against the door, pounding into the wood until he can feel bruises blooming. Behind him, Potter sniggers, and Draco pounds harder. This is not how today is going, he thinks, somehow the wood will move and he will be free. Somehow.

“It’s not going to work,” Potter’s mocking voice rings out through the cell. “No matter how you keep pounding, the dog is never going to come.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?” Draco asks, whirling to where Potter is still, idiotically, leaning back against the wall. Potter smirks, as though he’s just told himself some sort of joke, and doesn’t answer. 

“This is your fault, anyway!” Draco hisses and somehow, impossibly, Potter smirks harder. “If you hadn’t broken that vile in the last dungeon they wouldn’t have known we were after them.” 

Potter blinks. He pushes off the wall and stalks over to Draco. “I had to break the vile,” he says slowly, as though talking to someone very, very stupid. “There was evidence in there, how else was I supposed to get it out?” As though he couldn’t have simply tipped the thing on its head and waited for it to drip out. As if he couldn’t have done anything else besides dashing it to pieces. 

Draco feels a growl rising in his throat. An actual growl. Potter brings out the worst in him.

“There was a vigilance spell on it!” He’s right in Potter’s face now. Or rather, Potter is right in his. It’s hard to tell the difference. “That’s how they knew we were coming!” That’s how they had known to set the trap that had snared them. How this whole goddamn thing had come crashing down on them.

Potter, somehow, steps impossibly closer to him. There is no air in the room. No air in the entire world. Just the fire in Potter’s eyes and Draco throat.

“And how would you know that?” Potter snarls, “did your little friends tell you?”

Draco feels the shove before he realizes what’s happening, sees Potter’s face rushing away from his before he has time to feel the wall slamming into his back. There is the darkness of his eyes closing and then he is up, rushing at Potter and ramming his shoulder into Potter’s chest.

Potter doesn’t try to move, doesn’t try to dodge out of the way, just plants his feet and catches Draco’s shoulder with a little whoosh of breath, and the next thing Draco knows, his arm is twisted behind his back and Potter is breathing into his ear.

“Did they teach you that too?” He pants. “I didn’t know they gave lessons on how to be a terrible fighter.” It’s so bad of an insult that Draco groans. Potter, the idiot, seems to take it as a grunt of pain and just twists his arm further. 

Draco is about to do that thing that Pansy taught him, where you let your legs go slack, and elbow your attacker in the balls when they try and catch you, when the door to the cell swings open.

“Sorry to interrupt such a touching moment,” a reedy voice rings out across the cell and Draco really does feel his stomach drop. He’d wonder why they hadn’t been tortured yet. 

Draco can hear Potter’s screams echoing down the hall, and he’s just feeling smug that he hasn’t added in his own when Swanson (or Haze, he can’t tell which) cuts his wand down and a gash slices his chest. Draco does scream then, though maybe not as loud as Potter, or that’s what he tells himself, and feels the blood bloom across the tattered front of his robes. 

Swanson (or Haze, and who the fuck cares, anyway?) twists his wand, drawing Draco’s magic to the surface under his skin, letting it pool and collect there before wrenching his arm around and clenching Draco’s magic in an iron fist. Draco screams. 

He’s panting and sobbing by the time they’re through, his skin wet with blood, but a smile curves around the back of his teeth. He hasn’t told them anything. Yet.

They throw him back in the cell with a scrap of bread and a tin of water. So they want to keep him alive then, that’s encouraging. A moment later, the door opens again, and Potter is tossed in. It doesn’t escape Draco’s notice that he stumbles before falling to the floor. At least they hadn’t gone easy on him, either. That would be embarrassing, Draco thinks, through the haze of pain, to not hold up to torture as well as Harry Potter. It may be one of the stupidest thoughts of Draco’s ever had. He’s not sorry for it, if it keeps him going.

Somehow, Potter has lost his robe and shirt in the whole ordeal, and he looks every inch the tortured hero. His chest is bisected by cuts, though not as deep as Draco’s, and he’s panting manfully, abs on full display without his shirt.

Draco eyes him, disdainfully. “Reenacting your cover of Witch Weekly, I see.” He cocks his head. “What was it, Harry Potter: How to Go All Night.” It feels good to talk, helps to edge out the blackness swimming at the corners of his vision. His magic is throbbing in his veins, tattered and bruised, and really, who taught the Death Eaters to torture like that? It seems like poor form, if nothing else. Effective, but poor form.

Potter smiles, brash, the same one that also graced the cover of Witch Weekly. Not that Draco reads that trash. Not usually.

“They liked my work ethic,” he drawls, and the innuendo is clear in his voice. Draco rolls his eyes. Half of his vision is now swathed in black. The walls of the cell seem closer than they were just moments before.

“You need to get that off,” Potter says, tugging at the corner of Draco’s robes. Draco grimaces as the fabric peels back from where it’s stuck in his wound.

“I will slit your throat.” He hisses and Potter, the bastard, smiles. 

“They already did that,” he says, pointing to a line of blood edging from his collar bone.

Despite Draco’s protests he begins to peel Draco’s robes from his body and Draco can’t quite seem to lift his arms to stop him. The fabric is lodged in Draco’s skin and it’s slow going. 

“Did you tell them anything?” Potter asks, voice too casual, and Draco winces as a strip of fabric separates from his skin with a wet snick. 

“What’s there to tell?” he asks. And really, what is there? Draco wouldn’t have said anything, anyway, but they questions they were asking, ridiculous things, about the splitting of souls, had barely made sense, anyway. It sounded like ridiculous magic, something only a madman would attempt, and Draco had said so, and paid dearly for the remark.

Potter’s hands still on his body, and for a moment Draco thinks he’s done, that he’ll toss the robes away and then get back to never touching Draco again. Then his voice rings out, low in the still room.

“What’s that?” he asks, and it honestly takes Draco a minute to remember. He’s about to say that it’s a chest, or didn’t Potter recognize it, without seventeen abs? Then he remembers.

“None of your business,” he spits, and tries to lean out of Potter’s grip. The shadows in the corners of his eyes really are getting on his nerves now.

Potter strips the robes from his body, pulling them away in one swift movement that leaves Draco’s skin screaming. What’s left is Draco’s skin, pale and white, and also, not.

It’s not that Draco has forgotten about the mark, not that he doesn’t know what’s happened to him, just that it’s been there so long, and become such a part of Draco’s life that, at times, he forgets that everyone else doesn’t know, that it’s not written on his face.

The lines of Draco’s mark have bled out, crawling up his skin and over his arm to dye his shoulder and half of his chest a deep black. Spidery lines of ink jut from the abyss, reaching out to wrap tendrils around his waist and down his hips.

Potter is staring. He’s taken a step back, hands up. Afraid to touch Draco. Draco is almost glad.

Draco grabs for the tattered remnants of his robes, rolling them into a ball and holding them against the worst of the bleeding. 

“What did you think happened to reformed Death Eaters?” Draco sneers. “What did you think we paid in? Did you think it was all award dinners and compliments?” What did Potter know? With his charmed life and glowing legacy? This is what Draco got. Just this. And a job that worked him to the bone and he was grateful for.

Potter blinks at him, taking it in. Draco expects something immense to fall from Potter’s lips, something of importance. Some statement that matches the enormity of what’s before him.

Instead, what Potter says is, “How do you have sex?” Draco has never wanted to hit someone more. Never. Not when he was in school, not during the trials, when half of the wizarding world was at his throat, not last week at the pub when Blaise said is new waistcoat made him look desperate. 

“I liked you better when we were in school.” He says.

Potter smiles. Draco hates it. “You hated me when we were in school.”

Draco can feel his canines pock out from beneath his lips. “I despised you,” he says.

The shadows at the edge of his eyes are doing this annoying thing where they jump and shiver and Draco blinks, trying to will them away. If he can just keep doing this, just keep looking at Potter and remembering how much he hates him, it will all be ok. 

Draco feels his eyes close. Once. Twice. Then he faints dead away.

Draco comes to in a dark room. Someone is fumbling with his chest and Draco is suddenly aware that his skin feels like it’s on fire. All of it. All of his skin. Fire. 

He lets out a groan, trying to curl in on himself, but the hands at his chest steady him.

“Easy now,” comes a voice, deep in the dark and Draco stiffens, then regrets it. Damn it to hell. It’s Potter. He’s gone and gotten himself kidnapped with Potter, he remembers now.

Draco tries to roll away, tries to touch anything that’s not Potter, but the wall is blocking his back.

“Get the fuck off me,” he growls, ignoring the way his skin aches even more with the movement. The cut on his chest really is quite deep and he’s lost a lot of blood.

Potter’s hands don’t still on his chest. Instead, he seems to work faster, using a ripped part of Draco’s own robes and the tin of water to mop up his blood.

“I don’t like this either,” he says, “but if we don’t clean you up it’s going to get infected and then I’m going to get blamed for losing another partner.” There had been a trial. Potter was probably innocent. Probably. 

“We don’t have to do anything,” he sneers, trying and failing to move away from Potter’s hands. Potter pokes the gash in his stomach. Stars burst at the corner of Draco’s vision. For a moment that’s all he can see. Stars. Then Potter’s face. He almost vomits. 

“Stay still,” Potter commands, like he’s used to everyone doing exactly what he says. Draco ignores him, wrestling himself up into a sitting position, before nearly doubling over again with the pain. He breathes in through his nose. Once. Twice. If he’s going to do this, he’s going to face it sitting up. 

He leans his head into the wall and focuses on breathing. Somewhere, he’s sure Potter is still messing with his chest, because he can hear the lap of water in the bowl, but all he can feel is the rush of blood in his head, and the burn in his limbs. He vows, stoically and surely, that he will not die in some dingy cell with only Harry-fucking-Potter for company. He will not. He won’t allow it. Somehow, Draco is going to get out of here, and die like any self-respecting redeemed Death Eater: alone with a pile of money.

“Stay still,” Potter grits out again, and Draco must’ve moved, because Potter is once again prodding him in the side. “I’ve killed seven people,” Potter growls, “don’t make me kill you, too.” Potter’s face is grim. His own chest and arms are smeared with blood. It glistens on his skin. If only the people at Witch Weekly could see him now. They’d probably make it their March cover photo. Not that Draco reads that trash, or would notice. 

Draco coughs up a mouthful of blood, and delights in spitting it directly into Potter’s face.

“I said get off me,” he breathes. Potter blinks, once in shock, then once more in disgust. 

“Fine, Malfoy,” he runs his hand across his face, scraping off the worst of Malfoy’s blood. A smear is left above his eye, much to Draco’s satisfaction. If he’s going to die in here with Harry Potter, he’s doing it on his own terms.

Draco has bartered much in his young life for the sake of dying on his own terms. It’s all he has. That and his fucked up mark. And his killer style (and fuck you very much, too, Blaise).

Potter rolls on his back, one arm curled around his ribs, and Draco can see a bruise spreading there, sickly and modeled. 

“We’re going to die here, aren’t we?” Potter asks, as though he can read Draco’s mind. 

“Hey,” Draco kicks out, one foot connecting solidly with Potter’s leg. They both wince. Potter rolls away from him, leaving a smear of blood on the floor. Draco pulls in a breath. It shudders against his ribs.

“Hey,” he says again, and he can feel the breath leaving his body, feel where it scrapes against his lunges. “Did they raise quitters in Gryffindor?” He’s sure there’s a more devastating insult, but right now he can’t quite seem to wrap his fingers around it.

Potter rolls back towards him. The blood under his side is now thick and smeared. 

“As opposed to what?” he asks, “murderers?”

And here it is. The worst thing he could think to say to Potter. And he didn’t even have to try. “I haven’t killed anyone,” he says, spitting his words like poison, like his own blood, right into Potter’s face.

Potter’s face crumples into a sneer. “What the fuck ever,” he says, “your side killed plenty, we’re just cleaning up.”

Draco leans forward, even though it makes his side scream and his skin burn. “What does that make you then?” He says, very quietly, “A big tough hero?”

Potter scoffs. “Maybe I am,” he says, and goes to push himself up, but his fingers slip on the blood and he crashes back to the floor with a thud.

“Big tough hero,” Draco mocks. He almost misses the moment when Potter hits him. One moment his head is against the wall, and then it’s slamming into the wall and a flash of lighting is shooting across his face from the bridge of his nose. He coughs blood again. And this time, the blood from his nose mixes with the blood in his mouth and suddenly Draco is choking on it. 

He gasps, fighting for breath, fighting to do anything other than sit there and be beaten to death by Harry-fucking-Potter. This time, when he spits blood it trickles down his front in a pathetic dribble, smearing into the blood on his chest. Potter smiles. This really is the worst day ever.

Potter doesn’t hit him again, but Draco thinks he might like to. They’ve still got a war between them, Potter and he. They’re lost somewhere together on a battlefield of corpses. 

Draco slumps back into the wall and feels unconsciousness begin to close over him. The last thing he sees, before he closes his eyes, is Harry-fucking-Potter staring murderously at him.

The second time they take him, Draco is ready. At least, that’s what he tells himself.  
Until they have something like needles under his fingernails and a colony of phantom ants crawling across his brain. Draco screams and screams and screams and doesn’t even feel better when he hears Potter yelling too. No matter how much he hates Potter, and he’s almost sure he does, there’s nothing that compares to this. The slice at his magic until Draco isn’t even sure it’s his magic, anymore, isn’t even sure he’s himself. So much of him is what lives under the surface, and with the Death Eaters chipping away at it, he’s not sure what he has left.

When they toss Draco back into the cell, Potter is already there, a grimmer version of himself than any Draco has seen before. Blood drips from a deep cut on his shoulder and his side is a mottled canvas of purple and blue. Draco’s stomach drops sickly when he realizes that Potter is missing two fingers on his right hand. Something has drawn tight in Potter’s face, in the dogged curve of his mouth where it’s open in a pant, in the solid line of his eyebrows. Potter will endure, whatever this. He will tell them nothing.

There is a moment where, somehow, Draco is still on his feet. He stands in the empty space, feels the air brush his skin, the fire it leaves behind. Then his legs crumble, and he falls forward. He barely manages to bring his arms up to catch himself, to protect his face. Not that it matters, much. One of his eyes is already swelling shut, and his nose, where Potter had hit it, throbs even beyond the rest of his skin.

For a moment, the world goes joyously, blissfully black, then someone is shaking his shoulder and pain sears his body.

“Malfoy,” Potter shouts. “Do not fucking fall asleep, you goddamn coward!” Potter’s hands are on him, rough and sharp, dragging Draco into the room and bracing his back against the wall. Potter’s still got an arm curled around his middle, but at least he’s sitting up. Draco sinks back into the floor, thankful for nothing more than the solid stone against his head, the cold he can feel seeping out to cool his body. Maybe he was wrong. Maybe he will die here. He has nothing left.

He feels his eyes shut, something in him slipping away. Then fire sears across his cheek, sharp and hot. Draco’s eyes fly open. Potter is already drawing his good hand back, ready for another slap.

“You slapped me,” Draco slurs, and Potter drops his hand. It falls to rest on Draco’s wrist, and Draco is too tired, too on fire to move it.

“You deserved it.” Potter says. This close, now with his eyes open, Draco can see that Potter’s hair is spiked with blood, the red bleeding into the black so effortlessly it is likes shadows lost among shadows. 

“What do they even want?” The words spring desperately from Draco’s lips. If he knew, he would tell them, maybe. Just to end this.

A shadow passes over Potter’s face. Just for a moment, blink and you’d miss is. Draco doesn’t.

“You know,” he says slowly, realizing. “They’re not mad, there really is something to it, with the splitting of souls.” 

A muscle tightens in Potter’s jaw. He glares at Draco. “I’m not telling them.” he says.

Draco nods. It sends an explosion of pain ricocheting through his skull, but he does it anyway. “Good.” he gasps. “Don’t tell me either.” 

Something changes in Potter’s face then, a realization just beginning to grow.

“Why not?” he asks, tentatively.

Draco feels the fire in his head begin to spread, to burn everything in sight. The Death Eaters had dug into his skull until he’s not sure there’s anything left, anything but flame. “Because I might tell them,” he confesses, “And I don’t want anyone else getting hurt.” With the death eaters, there’s no doubt of a body count. 

Potter looks at him. Really looks at him for a span of what must be minutes, if Draco believed in a time other than pain right now. Finally he nods.

“Alright,” he says. He looks to the wall behind Draco and doesn’t meet Draco’s eyes.

The third time they come for them, Draco can’t stand. The world is swimming between dark to light and his arm is hanging uselessly at his side. His fingers had stopped working hours ago. He hadn’t told Potter. Potter stands before him as he lies, boneless on the floor, and faces off against the two armed death eaters.

“You can’t take him,” he says, voice low and commanding. And Draco hopes, very much, just for a minute, that the death eaters listen to him like everyone else does. They don’t. They push Potter aside and drag Draco away.

This time they don’t cut him. They torture him instead with images of his dead mother, Pansy strung up in the Slytherin common room, Blaise headless but somehow still walking. It goes on and on and on, until Draco cannot tell what is real and what is a nightmare, until he can no longer unbraid the visions from his own waking life. 

Then, just to be contrary, they actually do torture him. Draco loses four teeth and one of his eyes. It was the swollen one, anyway, so it’s not like it was doing any good, besides being attached to his head.

He doesn’t remember the walk back to the cell, just that one moment he is there, a sobbing, shivering mess on the floor, and somehow, nonsensically, Potter has an arm around him, dragging him back.

“He doesn’t know anything!” Potter bellows, and the words come out stilted through his own broken nose. 

One-handed, Potter uses what’s left of their water to wipe him down, but the worst of his injuries are untouchable. What harm is burnt skin against the image of his mother’s lifeless face?

Draco’s not even sure if he’s still crying, not even sure what that looks like from an empty eye socket, doesn’t care if Potter sees. Gone are the days when he’d curse Potter for catching sight of his emotion. Here, in the cell, there is nothing but pain. Nothing but the two of them.

Potter pushes them to the back of the cell, as if to buy them a few more seconds when the Death Eaters come through the door and bundles Draco to his chest. Draco can feel the crust of dried blood between their skin, but doesn’t know if it belongs to him or Potter, doesn’t know if he’s dying or being burnt alive.

“We’ll get out of this,” Potter vows, and the darkness closes in around them. Never before in his life has Draco hoped that Harry Potter was right. He has very little else to hope for.

The fourth time they come for them, Potter will not physically let go of them, so they take them both. It is somehow worse, to see Potter scream, as well as hear it, and when the shrieks leave his own mouth, he can see Potter tensing beneath the blood. They are gone from the cell an awfully long time.

Time passes like that. Day, night, it doesn’t matter. There is just pain, then more pain, then pain again. Sometimes, the Death Eaters heal them, just so they can have the pleasure of cutting them up again. But neither of them are healer’s and they don’t do a very good job. Potter doesn’t break. He doesn’t tell Draco the secret either. Draco doesn’t plead with him for it, but it’s a close thing.

They are always taken together now. Always dragged down the hall one after another, made to watch as well as endure, and Draco wonders when the idea of Potter being tortured became horrific, instead of intriguing. Probably around the second time. He would wish a lot of things on Potter, but this isn’t one of them.

The worst is when they are left alone. When it seems like, maybe, their captures have forgotten about them. When it seems like they could pass whole days unharmed.

Draco’s skin burns and Potter tells him that an infection has set in. Draco wants to mock him, to ask him when he had time to become a medi-wizard, admits his throngs of adoring fans, but the words catch in his throat, coming out instead a haggard cough, and he doesn’t complain when Potter throws an arm around him and pulls him close.

If he’s going to die, at least someone will be holding him, at least his mother will know that much.

He feels Potter’s hand, the one without the last two fingers, tighten on his ribs, makes a noise as pain blooms under his fingers. Potters goes to pull away, but Draco catches the last of his fingers, holds him close. Someone was holding me, he thinks. That’s what they’ll tell my mother.

The room swims in front of him and Draco wonders when his vision will go. When this will all become so much shadow. There is nothing left to be frightened of, nothing but this. 

He clutches Potter’s fingers tightly, even though the press of their hands at his ribs has him seeing flashes of lights.

“Don’t leave me,” he asks. It’s the only thing he can think of. The only thing he wants most in this world.

“I won’t,” Potter says, and his voice is shaky, but he’s sure.

The twentieth time they’re taken they go, hand-in-hand. The Death Eaters try to pry their fingers from each other, but they hang on. The Death Eaters may have the strength of healthy, well-fed men, but they have the only thing in the world that matters clutched in their hands. The Death Eaters grapple with them. They laugh. They lead them down the hall.

This is it. Draco thinks. A soul can withstand only so much of this, no matter what a body endures. Frantically, he searches for Potter’s gaze and finds it. Potter’s face is grim. He knows. Slowly, so only Draco can see, he gives a nod of his head. Together, then. They’ll die together.

When the light bursts through the corridor, that’s what he thinks it is. Death. Finally. Thankfully. It is not until he blinks that he sees the glow of a dozen raised wands. 

When his world is saved, Draco Malfoy is holding Harry Potter’s hand.

They try to take them from each other, to bundle them apart to separate healers, but Draco and Potter will not let go. They withstood Death Eaters, and weeks in captivity. A few healers aren’t going to take the from each other. There is nothing but this, nothing but Potter’s hand in his.

Finally a familiar face pushes through the crowed, and Draco feels Potter relax beside him, for the first time in weeks.

Weasley is frantic, grief-stricken, and when he sees Potter he throws himself on him, injuries be damned, wrapping him in a hug that seems to last hours. Through it all, Potter still does not let go of his hand. Draco wonders if they will ever let go, if they will ever move past this.

Weasley tells them, though he’s probably not supposed to (or rather, he tells Potter, and Draco is there, so he hears too) that their captures were part of the dregs of the Death Eaters, the ones who still think the Dark Lord can be brought back, and that they had used the corrupt potions as a lure, which Potter and Draco had fallen for. They’d been gone for a month. The whole wizarding world had been in an uproar, trying to track down the boy who lived, and one reformed Death Eater.

Finally, Weasley is dragged back from the healers tent, and off to where he’s already supposed to be, and there’s a moment where Potter and Draco are once again alone. It feels so familiar, somehow.

Draco looks down at their hands. Potter’s is still bloody in his.

“You can let go now,” he says, and takes a moment to let his grip soften, let his fingers unfurl.

Potter doesn’t move. There is still blood in his hair and agony on his face.

“I don’t think I can,” he says, quietly, and something in Draco’s heart stills.

Somewhere, lost on a battlefield in an endless war, one man is taking another’s hand. There is blood, and there are corpses, but there is also this, also a quiet truce, and that might end something. It might start something, too. 

Gently, so gently, Potter takes their hands and holds them to his chest. Draco can feel the beating of his heart. Still beating, after all this time. Still beating. He can feel fire on his skin, the seam where Potter broke his nose, which will never truly heal. He feels his own heart beating in his chest. There is this, too. And there is this. 

Around them, the healers swirl. They fix Potter’s nose, and Draco’s head, and press tonics and bandages to their skin. There are questions and answers and the quiet swell of something growing. 

Draco and Potter sit together, silent, for a long time.

**Author's Note:**

> The dog reference Harry makes is a reference to Pirates of the Caribbean, because I assume Harry watches muggle movies. And is kind of an asshole about it.


End file.
